Pasture Management
It's taken way longer than I expected to come up with a pasture management system that seems to (knock on wood) be working. Given that we have 27.5 acres, most people think we have more than enough pasture, but with ~11 acres in hay, we've been hanging out around 3 acres of pasture. The two "best" pastures were planted along with the hay field in fall of 2017, and then fenced on the hottest Memorial Day weekend we could have had. With the two main pastures up and running, we thought we were good to limp along the original pasture, and eventually redid the fencing there, adding a real gate to the very wide opening that had originally had a stretchy fence gate. Rotation wise, all of our pastures are gated directly onto the paddock, where there is shelter, the winter hay feeder and water. I wanted the horses to always have the auto waterer available, as well as shelter from bad weather, sun and bugs. The pastures otherwise don't have a lot of natural shelter; any t...